I applied to Palantir directly through their website. 24 days later I received an email from them asking for a time to set up a technical pre-screen. That technical pre-screen lasted about 5 minutes during which they asked about the purpose of nsswitch.conf, removing files more than 1 week old, how to find a directory in / with the most usage, and how to see the remote NFS mounts on a system I don't have access to. Two days later they contacted me again asking for a date for an initial phone screen to be scheduled in 4 days.
(We are now 32 days into the process). The phone screen was with one of the engineers on the team and lasted about 20 minutes. Questions included what is your best on-call war story, What is bind and how does it work, tell me how DNS works, what is your ideal job, what is your super power, why Palantir, and how many ways can you find to copy a file. 10 days later they emailed again with an offer for a second phone screen to occur the next day.
(We are now 43 days into the process.) This was mostly an informational chat about Palantir. I don't see any of my notes on the questions they asked but I see a lot of information they provided me about the company. A few hours later I received an offer for an on-site interview to occur in 3 1/2 weeks.
(We are now 68 days into the process.) They flew me out on a Sunday, put me up in a really plush hotel, gave me a rental car, covered all costs (including the mini-bar), and gave me a "goodie-bag" with some Palantir swag and snacks. The next day I was to start on-site around 10:00 AM. The interview process included talking with 2 "managers" (more on that later), 3 engineers, and 1 of the "founders". It also included going to lunch with some team members and watching an hour demo of their software product. I was done at 6:00 PM. Questions during the various interviews included: What is in the init.d directories, how do you set run levels, what are different RAID levels, what happens if you kill the init process, what is a relational db, why would you use a hard link versus a soft link, walk through of a hardware troubleshooting question (one of 2 CPUs are bad), what is your best hack you've done to fix a problem, what is your super power, what is the one tweet you would send to the world, what are you passionate about, and what would YOU use our product for. The "founder" asked me 4 questions - what technologies would you like to learn, what is the coolest it technology to come out in the last 12-18 months, what problem will you solve for us, and what is something where you really had to dig in to find the solution.
Two days later I received a generic email from a generic email account at Palntir saying I was not chosen but they would keep my resume on file. That ended the 70 day process.
First, the good things I found out. They give you 3 meals a day for free in their cafeteria. They also provide a stipend if you live really close to the office. And they seem to be able to get anything they want (i.e., special booze, fancy coffee, laundry service, etc...) just by asking.
The number of drawbacks for me were much greater. I got the feeling everyone there "drank the coolaid". Much ado was made about there being no managers and the company was totally flat. There were team leaders, but no decision makers - you just did what you thought was right. The work environment was sloppy with excess hardware laying around haphazardly pretty much everywhere. Their on-call rotation moved between the Unix, Windows, and network teams, but if you as a Unix person got a Windows call, you don't have the ability or logins to fix it - you just page out the Windows guys. The amount they bragged about being able to buy anything made me concern about the company spending too much money. The technical bar they presented in their interviews seemed low - no one knew any programming languages and everything was done using bash. During lunch with the team, they did a lot of complaining about other teams and how annoying the problems were they faced on a day to day basis. Quarterly they reboot all of their internal Unix systems and expect approximately 30% of them to not recover. That is what they would work on for the next few weeks. The "manager" failed to show up for his interview slot and 2 other came without any prepared questions or even having seen my resume (and it was pretty obvious they were not prepared with any questions - it was more a rambling question time). One of the interviewers really liked cussing (not horribly, but one cuss word every minute).
I walked away from the interview with serious concerns about the company, the lack of leadership, the unprofessionalism they simply referred to as "we're a start up!", lack of organization, and group-think.
